iTunes is beachballing. Unable to fix

I am running iTunes on a Mac Pro running OS X Mavericks. It's worked fine until a few weeks ago.
I have a music collection of approximately 3000 songs and have a large collection of podcasts I subscribe to. It was originally set up to download podcasts for several episodes and I changed the setting to only download the most recent podcast. After I did this I decided to delete all episodes of each podcast other than the most recent. With my collection this was many but I highlighted all of them and then selected to delete them. I believe I did that by right clicking and select delete. That is when the problem started.
Now whenever I open iTunes it simply beachballs. I am not sure if it's simply locked up or is actually doing the work of deleting those podcasts. I have even let it run overnight hoping that it would be completed in the morning but I have woken up to find my computer locked up. It's obviously using up a massive amount of resources.
I use iTunes a lot and miss having it. Any idea of how I can fix this?
Thanks!

Your iTunes folder is located at /Users/username/Music/iTunes so the content should all be in there. If the podcast files still exist, you can try removing them manually and opening iTunes.

Your iTunes Library might be damaged in which case you can start over. If you quit iTunes and hold the alt-key or option-key when launching, you can create a new library. If the content doesn't show up automatically, you'd simply drag your iTunes folder into the library and it should add all the content back in.